HAROLD BUBIL: Uncommon uses for common items

Wednesday

Crushed aluminum cans, ping-pong balls, brooms and Dixie Cups don’t sound like building materials — unless you are familiar with the work of the prominent Los Angeles architecture firm Brooks + Scarpa.

Led by Larry Scarpa and Angela Brooks, the firm has established an international reputation by blending progressive architecture with fine art.

“We use all kinds of common objects in our work that are not necessarily used as architectural items,” said Scarpa. “Even crushed aluminum cans have become part of our buildings. We have done whole buildings with facades made of industrial brooms, not just as a small element.”

The work of Brooks + Scarpa will be featured in an exhibit at the Center for Architecture Sarasota, 265 S. Orange Ave., through April 14, with free admission. The exhibit will recreate a studio environment. A VIP reception for “Ordinary and Extraordinary: Architecture of Heightened Awareness” will be held from 6 to 8 p.m. Saturday at CFAS. For tickets, call 941-350-5430.

Two other exhibit-related events are scheduled. At 6:30 p.m. Feb. 23, Brooks + Scarpa principal Jeff Huber, who runs the firm’s two-year-old Fort Lauderdale office, will moderate a panel discussion titled “Wicked Water.” Among the panelists is John Englander, whose book on sea-level rise, “High Tide of Main Street,” has raised awareness among government officials and was influential in encouraging Florida architects to plan for 3 feet of sea-level rise in the 21st century.

Brooks + Scarpa has won state and national awards from the American Institute of Architects for its work with the City of Fort Lauderdale in planning for sea-level rise. The 2018 AIA Honor Award in Urban Design is for the firm’s “Salty Urbanism: Sea-Level Rise Adaptation in Urban Areas.”

On March 16, also at 6:30 p.m. at CFAS, Scarpa will lecture on the “Ordinary and Extraordinary” theme during a book-signing event.

“I will be speaking about how you can look at familiar things in an unfamiliar way,” Scarpa said. “You can find extraordinary things in everyday objects, and that can translate into design.”

Using modern technology, Scarpa said, architects are able to do “hyper-specialized façades” that can contribute to the performance — its energy efficiency, among other factors — of the building.

“We have done several net-zero-energy buildings, as well,” he said. “A lot of that experimentation is about how you make buildings more performative.”

Brooks + Scarpa recently completed a transportation hub building in Seattle on which the façade is covered in customized planks of aluminum that were fabricated from the architectural drawings.

“Everything was numbered like an assembly line,” Scarpa said. “We call it a global regionalism, where you are addressing localized issues by using global technologies.”

He used the Umbrella House, built in 1953 in Sarasota’s Lido Shores and designed by Paul Rudolph, as an example.

“Rudolph bought tomato stakes from a farmer to make the umbrella,” Scarpa said. “You can take the same principle of shading the home with a trellis, but use more global technologies to do so, rather than relying on the farmer around the corner.”

Early in his career, the Polk County native worked in the New York office of Rudolph, the most prominent of the “Sarasota School” of midcentury modern architects.

“I worked for him in the early 1980s,” Scarpa said of Rudolph, “on his highrises in Southeast Asia. I will show one drawing from that time during the show at CFAS.

“When I worked for him, it was at the height of postmodernism, when he had fallen out of favor,” Scarpa said. “But he was super busy in Southeast Asia.”

Rudolph’s ardent defense of modernism and his extremely individual interpretation of it caused him to lose work in America, where he was a star in the 1950s and early 1960s.

“He tended to not look back,” Scarpa said of Rudolph in the early ’80s. “You could tell it bothered him, but he just moved forward.

“It was very complicated with him. If he liked you, he loved you. If he didn’t like you, he hated you,” Scarpa said. “I had a good relationship with him because I had worked for Gene Leedy, and Gene was Rudolph’s very first employee in Sarasota. Paul could be charming in one second and vicious in the next.”

Leedy, 89, of Winter Haven, will be guest of honor at the Friday reception.

The author is former real estate editor of the Herald-Tribune, now semi-retired. Harold.Bubil@heraldtribune.com.

Never miss a story

Choose the plan that's right for you.
Digital access or digital and print delivery.